Credit crunch makes digital strategy more critical, says Carter

The new government minister in charge of a string of vital decisions about Britain's media and technology industries has claimed that the importance of securing their future has increased due to the global financial crisis.

Stephen Carter, who was appointed to the new role of minister for communications, technology and broadcasting earlier this month and reports to both the culture secretary, Andy Burnham, and the business secretary, Peter Mandelson, vowed to accelerate decision-making in a number of key areas.

"Whatever is going to happen to the macro-economy, we can all agree that, in the short- and possibly medium-term, the financial services sector is going to take some time to restructure," said Carter, in his first interview since taking the job. "So, from a UK plc perspective, this is an important sector and it becomes relatively an even more important sector."

Carter, the founding chief executive of the media regulator Ofcom, who most recently spent a turbulent 10 months as Gordon Brown's chief of strategy and principal adviser, will draw together work in existing areas of government and has promised to deliver swift conclusions on a number of pressing issues. These include the future of digital radio, the questions surrounding the next generation of broadband access and mobile phone networks, and the future funding of public-service broadcasting.

His report, Digital Britain, will also consider issues around the digital divide and look into whether there should be a guarantee of universal access to broadband for all consumers. He has promised to deliver a set of recommendations by January.

Carter said it was a "unique opportunity" to set the direction of the broadcasting, technology and communications industries over the next five years.

"While we have a converged regulator, the machinery of government is still separated," he said. "That was the rationale behind having a ministerial responsibility across the brief, and having someone who knows something about it."

Carter's appointment to the new role was openly welcomed by Ofcom, where executives feel a number of key policy areas have now reached a point where they require urgent government action.

But it is likely to be viewed with some trepidation by the BBC, which has been fighting a public battle with the regulator over the idea of potentially using the so-called "surplus" licence fee to fund a looming funding crisis among its public-service rivals.

"We're very good at this stuff in this country. The things that drive us mad because the tubes are crowded are actually rather good if you're looking at networks. You've got highly dense populations in a relatively small geography. Network density is a good thing. That's one of the reasons why we have such a rich free-to-air broadcast heritage," said Carter, who is also the former UK chief executive of the cable company NTL.

"English is an advantage, let's not underestimate that, and we're a nation of wordsmiths and creative people. We're as good at the poetry as we are at the pipes," he said. "There is an opportunity to take an international lead as the major economy in the world that is seen as a leading powerhouse in and across these industries."

While he was at Ofcom, broadcasters would sometimes complain that Carter was more concerned with building broadband networks than with safeguarding the future of public-service broadcasting. But he said last week that the two must go hand in hand.

"These are all important questions. But I always think it depends on how you come at them," he said. "If the first question you ask is how to preserve regional news on broadcast television, that feels a pretty narrow way of entering the discussion. But that doesn't mean you can't enter it in a broader way and ask what it means for those things."

He added: "I have spent nearly 10 years of my life working in and around this subject. I think broadband is commercially, socially, culturally, economically and politically transforming.

"You have to look at the issues the other way around. We are now at a point where we have to get that right, or we might end up preserving the past."

Carter said that after years of debate and discussion on issues such as public-service broadcasting, the time had come for decisions to be made. His conclusions will fall into three "baskets": some that can be enacted immediately; others that require modest legislation that can be pushed through before a general election, and other longer-term issues that will have to wait until after 2010.